Jonathan Meese is known for his liturgical performances and his Dionysian installations of paintings and sculptures that create complex worlds of closely knit systems, whose references range from the works of Wagner, Nietzsche, Stalin, Hitler, and the Marquis de Sade to John Boorman’s 1974 sci-fi cult film Zardoz and German actor Klaus Kinski. Meese’s work is also inspired by the pictorial anarchy of Dadaism, the polyphonic semantics of James Joyce, and the archaic symbolisms of Ezra Pound and Richard Wagner.

In 2005 Meese performed his critically acclaimed Jonathan Meese Is Mother Parsifal, a five-hour event staged in the scenery storehouse of the Berlin Staatsoper. The event’s accompanying music was piped in from the opera house’s production of Wagner’s Parsifal, which was being performed simultaneously in the main auditorium under the direction of Daniel Barenboim.